Archive
for
November 22nd, 2011

These strange photo-manipulations look like a Photoshop lesson gone wrong. Photographer Nacho Ormaechea carefully selects the subject, cuts them out then replaces their form with random images that add a sense of dep...

The phenakistoscope, invented in 1823, was an early animation display device. It presented a series of stills in sequence, much like a modern animated GIF. Pieterjan Grandry took a popular GIF file and adapted it f...

In the Seventh Century, monks built a monastery on the top of a natural stone pillar outside of Chiatura, Georgia. It was used by the Stylites -- Christian ascetics who lived on top of pillars to express their devoti...

If there's one big problem with the Internet, it's that you can't be on it all day, every day, without interruption. No, sometimes you must take your eyes away from the screen. Those are sad times, but they will soon be...

(Video Link)
The guys start out with light, easy tricks such as smashing fluorescent bulbs on themselves and slapping each other with sledgehammers. Then they get serious about their routine. It ends with a human py...

John Diamond's 1792 design for the Capitol was topped with a weathercock. Jim Allegro and Doug Michels wanted to build the National Sofa across the street from the White House so that hundreds of people could watch t...

It is a called a cherpumple, and it represents all that remains good and right in this fallen world. Pastry chef David Lowery made this 21 lb. 10 oz. concoction for guests at the Grand Geneva Resort in Wisconsin. I f...

Amazing! It may look like a low resolution photograph, but the original image is composed of more than two hundred thousand nonpareils in six different colors. It took Joel Brochu eight months of work with jewelry tw...

(Video Link)
The octopus crawled out of the sea and deposited a crab in front of the humans. YouTube user tuantube thinks that this was a friendly gesture. It wasn't. Like a cat leaving a dead mouse before you, it's...

You can find this sculpture at the Minneapolis Art Institute. If you use this rack, make sure that your chain is sturdier than a string of paperclips.
Link -via Colossal | Museum Website | Photo: Flickr user Arden...

While she was a struggling young artist in San Francisco in the early 1980s, Susan Kare picked up a typeface design gig for an up and coming company called Apple Computers. She designed the first proportionally space...

Here's an idea I can really get behind! Flattr proposes a new holiday -Pay A Blogger Day on November 29th.
Flattr, a startup that seeks to motivate Internet users to pay for content they love, is launching the first...

In the bizarro version of Futurama it's Zoidberg that does all the ass kicking. With rugged armor plates, vicious crab claws and a face scary enough to give Lanternfish nightmares, this alternate reality Doctor Zoidb...

The illustration on the cover of the Thanksgiving issue of The New Yorker magazine shows the Pilgrims immigrating to their new homeland. It's called “Promised Land” by Christoph Niemann. Linkimmigration, New York...

Before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, the Calvinist group spent about ten years in the Dutch town of Leiden. You probably don't know much about what happened to them there. Historian Jeremy Dupertuis B...

Check out this collection of posters made for classrooms in the 1970s. The captions have been removed, and newer (and funnier) captions attached by Michael Roberts of Denver Westword. The caption for the above image...

When you have a 3-year-old son and a one-year-old son, you try your best to keep an eye on them at all times. However, Mom was in the bathroom a little longer than usual, and these two found the new bag of flour. See the...

As it turns out, nature has its own method for transplanting stem cells. When a pregnant mouse has a heart attack, her fetus goes to work to help repair the damage! The experiment mated female lab mice with males who had...

This whimsical store appeared in downtown Pittsburgh on November 18th. The sign on the door says the owners are on vacation, but that just covers the fact that this is an art installation by Toby Atticus Fraley.The inst...

[http://youtu.be/lNpeTCEPrRk](YouTube link)Oskar the kitten may have been born blind, but things are looking up for him! Watch him in his new home, discovering what toys are for. We saw a slightly older Oskar in a video...

An abandoned way to frighten a frightening animal
by Nan Swift, Improbable Research staff
These drawings tell the purpose and the workings of a machine called a “pop-up device for deterring an attacking an...

(YouTube Link)
Apparently Nissin instant ramen noodles are Jedi Council approved, since Yoda has now come forward with his endorsement of the Cup Noodle. I can totally imagine Yoda sitting down in his cave on Dagobah...

(YouTube Link)
The lessons taught by the Captain Planet animated series were typically of an ecological or scientific nature, but there were a handful of episodes where the lessons went terribly wrong. Gamma Squad has...